Peter' down with percussion

After a six week course in professional musical theatre at the prestigious CAP21 in New York, Anisha Peter is back home and is already getting busy with her music. A solo artiste, she’s tuning her game up, collaborating on a socially relevant project with a jazz percussionist, an artiste who plays trance tunes and a rapper. While she can’t divulge any more details on that, she can tell us about how much she loves the stage.

“In fact, it was my proudest moment yet to have qualified for a course at CAP21. I met some wonderful people, reputed Broadway performers and faculty,” she tells us. Even as a kid, Anisha was always musically inclined and according to her mother, always had an ear of tunes. “I’d pick up on film songs and hum them, even if I didn’t know the lyrics. My dad noticed it, nudging me to join our local church choir. That’s where it all began,” says the 23-year-old singer and songwriter, who is deeply influenced by John Mayer and those women that she believes are powerful both on and off the stage – Kelly Clarkson and Pink.

An alumnus of Mount Carmel College and an integral part of its Western Music Association and the acoustic team, Anisha put her innate talent to good use and went on to represent her alma mater at various fests including Mood Indigo, Channel V’s India Fest and the October Fest. She also represented Bengaluru at the zonal finals of the World Karaoke Championship, finishing in third place.
“It was initially quite difficult to get my parents, both science graduates, to accept my decision,” she confesses, opting out of her post graduate placements to sign a contract for an album instead. “Both my parents and I took a leap of faith there,” she says.

Since then, there has been no looking back for Anisha. “Contrary to what people might think, people love seeing female artistes on stage. It does get difficult to fight biases. For instance, when artiste managers ask you to dress in a certain way or typecast your music and think you’re a girl, so you cannot do rock,” she says, getting candid.

Although Anisha has lit up the stage with her acoustics across the country, she only has warm things to say about her home ground. “Bengaluru audiences are really warm. They truly know and appreciate good music and they won’t shy away from telling you that,” she says, performing covers, occasionally dropping an original and working on some more to release this summer.

But in the long run, she says that she sees herself in musicals. “It combines my two passions - music and theatre. Music is all about emotion and expressing who you are on stage and nothing gets better than this format,” she says.